April 15th, 2014
It is a busy week on the home market with five films that either opened at least semi-wide or expanded semi-wide. However, unlike last week, there's no monster hit like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug leading the way. In fact, most of the semi-wide or wide releases on this week's list were critical and box office disappointments. Only Philomena did well with critics. Fortunately, it did well enough that it is a contender for Pick of the Week without even considering the extras on the DVD or Blu-ray. There are a few other new releases that are noteworthy, but most of them are catalog Blu-ray releases. These include Touch of Evil on Blu-ray and Double Indemnity on Blu-ray. In the end, I went with Touch of Evil, but I literally had to roll a dice to decide.
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April 11th, 2014
Dry Spell is an ultra-low budget film from the same filmmaker that brought us Raymond Did It. This film cost a mere $22,000 to make. It could have cost ten times that and still be considered low budget. So one has to have lowered expectations when it comes to the technical presentation. But on the other hand, if the writing is good, the film should still be entertaining, regardless of the production budget. Is that the case?
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February 11th, 2014
It's a strange week on the home market. If you look at the top ten selling new releases on Amazon.com, there are a couple of first run releases, a catalog title, TV on DVD release, and some limited releases. That's basically every category there is. The biggest release is Ender's Game, a film that failed to find an audience in theaters. It barely earned overall positive reviews and it isn't a contender for Pick of the Week. Some of the other best-selling releases are contenders, like The Jungle Book: Blu-ray Diamond Edition or Sherlock: Season Three on DVD or Blu-ray. There are also a few of the smaller releases that were in consideration, including Doctor Who: Story 33: The Moonbase and G.B.F. on DVD. But in the end, I went with Wadjda on Blu-ray Combo Pack for Pick of the Week. One last note, Dry Spell is coming out on Video on Demand. It's a good chance to support ultra-low-budget filmmaking and the reviews I've read have been positive.
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All Technical Credits
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